My Foraging Green Smoothie Today: And Why You Should Learn Foraging

You never make a green smoothie made entirely of free stuff growing in nature, unless you want to feel like one million bucks.

This is why I drink a quart of green smoothie (or juice, but usually smoothie) every single day of my life. Because they’re literally the most important thing I do, to feel good, slow aging, and swerve our collapsing health care system. (I am 55 and have not needed a doctor since the one who delivered my youngest child, about to turn 22.)

Per FTC guidelines, please assume links on this newsletter may be affiliate links that benefit us, though if so, the price is not marked up. Thank you for supporting our mission.

Here’s what I made this morning, which is admittedly a super hardcore smoothie that I will probably “slam” more than “sip” later today, but you can always add more water, and/or more fruit, if “slamming” isn’t for you:

(Squash leaf from my garden)

Foraging Green Smoothie

1. 3 cups water (or, for people rehabbing gut issues, “kefir” from coconut liquid, see *Tip at the bottom of this article)

2. 1 large leaf from my squash plant

3. 3 handfuls dollar weed (see *Tip at bottom)

4. 1 stalk aloe vera (see *Tip at bottom)

5. 3 handfuls of the leftover purple cabbage I had in the fridge

6. the morning glory that was choking my aloe vera in the garden

7. raw ginger root (I actually purchased this and the next ingredients)

8. Frozen mixed berries (adding more of this makes it less green-looking and more appealing to children and “picky eaters”)

9. Frozen chunks of banana (see *Tip at bottom)

10. Half an apple

Blend all the greens and ginger in the water, until smooth. Add the fruit and blend again until smooth. Pour into pint or quart jars and refrigerate until needed. Try to drink your green smoothies within 48 hours for best nutrition.

What do you do, if the ingredients you want to use don’t fit in your blender? Blend what fits till smooth, pour them into pint or quart jars in equal amounts, leaving 3” of smoothie at the bottom. Then add and blend the rest of the ingredients, and add that to the jars. Shake the jars before drinking.

I do not drink green smoothies for mouth pleasure. Given that I’ve been known as the GreenSmoothieGirl online for 16 years now, you may be surprised to know I don’t actually like green smoothies. But as I told my children hundreds of times, “Some foods we eat because they taste good, and some foods we eat because they’re good for us.”

I felt this was an important thing to teach my children, because I have many friends younger than me who have terrible health problems, eat no fiber and no nutrient-dense foods, and have never eaten anything for any reason other than that they enjoy it. It is not necessary to have terrible health problems in your 30’s and 40’s–but the solutions involve lifestyle changes such as drinking a green smoothie every day.

This foraged green smoothie? It’s in the latter category. I’d rather slam a glass of this smoothie every day, than take drugs for heart disease, or go through chemo and radiation.

Even if you’ve already been through chemo and radiation, drinking a green smoothie is a great way to use FIBER to bind to toxins and remove them from your body, and MICRONUTRIENTS to help your immune system make you whole again.

If you can’t think of it as a treat, or “mouth pleasure,” that’s okay, neither can I – think of it as medicinal. Because it is highly medicinal and disease preventative. The green smoothie you make with cabbage and spring greens and stuff you bought at the store is great, too–but, I refuse to be without my medicinal green smoothie, when I cannot get this stuff at the store.

Luckily, there’s edible greens growing all around you – and most people would rather be miserable till they die, rather than go round some up, so you’re unlikely to have a shortage of foraged greens! If I end up living on my food storage, it’ll be mostly lower-nutrition foods, so it’s great to know I can always get a nutrient dense smoothie, to augment what’s in my preparedness cache.

I discovered, in my quest to get well, after 4 years in bed following the flu jab in 1996, that GREENS are the most nutrient-dense, medicinal, disease-preventative CLASS of foods. And they’re also the class of foods most Americans are most deficient in.

In fact, I even find after the last 10 years of indoctrination by diet cults, that many people don’t have any idea why they should eat greens. Plus the internet will tell you dumb things like that greens have very little food value.

(What they mean is, they have very few CALORIES. However, we actually need micronutrients–which virtually any green has 100+ of–think vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients–more than we need calories. Almost no Americans are deficient in calories, while almost all Americans are deficient in many vitamins and minerals that are absolutely required for a healthy life. Plus, a high-fiber diet prevents virtually every disease, and a quart of green smoothie has 11 to 15 grams of soluble and insoluble fiber, to keep your gastrointestinal tract, and your blood and cardiovascular system, clean and alkaline and optimized. Most Americans don’t get 11 grams of fiber in their entire day.)

My husband has helped with our prepping the last 2 ½ years but he recently confessed that he has no interest in it. Why? Because he’s not one to think about the future. He’s a “float with the current” kind of guy. Whereas I confess that I probably think about the future too much.

While you might argue that a “happy medium” may be better, I’m still going to advocate for learning some new skills now, not later. “The future” will be a lot less stressful if you make some adaptations now, and with a good attitude. The following are actually skills, and they don’t usually go too well your first time, so start now and get your “learning year” behind you. You’ll feel empowered and far more ready for whatever crises lie ahead:

1. Gardening

2. Learning to dry clothes on a clothesline or a standing rack instead of the dryer

3. Foraging for greens for your smoothie

4. Learning how to make things happen without electricity (I actually have a hand-crank blender, it’s $70 on Amazon)

5. Growing fruit trees (get them from your nursery; they’re getting harder to obtain; my mango trees came from 2 ½ hours away!) (you can also find people who let the fruit drop off their trees and would be happy to let you pick their apples or apricots and dehydrate or can them)

Don’t underestimate that while nothing on that list is particularly hard, you don’t need a college degree for any of them–they take a little practice; they are good skills to have, period. If you give something a try, the first time it generally doesn’t go well.

But giving it a try and then trying it a few more times, you find yourself quickly empowered, and a lot less fearful of the impending crisis that no one can miss, hearing about in the media.

And they shouldn’t be considered for the first time after a crisis happens. Then you’re stressed and don’t have the tools you need. We already cannot find some of the items we want, in our shopping. We have been warned by every media outlet in the world–both mainstream and alternative–that “Biblical” food shortages are coming.

Just today, I looked this weed up that keeps popping up in my garden.

Google Lens tells you what the plant is, for free, or you can also get Picture This, but you pay for it. Turns out it’s called “field pumpkin,” and it’s edible. Sad that I’ve been weeding it, and throwing it in compost! (Yes, I’ll do content soon, on a cool, easy way to compost.)

It’s going in my smoothie next, I think I’ll just let it keep growing in my garden since it’s doing better than some of my cultivated plants.

If you have Google Chrome on your phone, go into it, press on the lens/photo icon, and either take a pic of the plant or use a photo from your phone. 

You may then need to ask a search engine whether it’s edible. Brave and SwissCows are the search engines we use, since Google has systematically been taking all natural-health information out of your search results, for about 5 years now.

(We know this because I’ve written thousands of great blog posts about natural health, on GreenSmoothieGirl.com for 16 years, and Google no longer shows them to you when you search. My colleagues and I have all been experiencing the same thing for years. That’s why I’m blogging on Substack now, instead of my own website. 2 million people a year used to visit GSG, and now very few see any of my extensively referenced posts on many health-related subjects for 16 years, via search. So, using Google Lens is just more dependence on Google, who has no respect for your privacy nor your ability to find alternatives to pharma: soon I will write a blog post on de-Googling your phone.)

*Tip about fermenting coconut water, AKA coconut liquid: not only is the coconut liquid have a perfect array of electrolytes, preferred by health-conscious athletes over Gatorade, but you can very easily get in the habit of letting your live kefir grains “ferment” the coconut water every day. Here’s more detailed content from my website on that, and you can order some dried “water kefir grains” from the Kefir Lady.

She’s old-school and anti-establishment and does not participate in banking, so you send her cash in an envelope, but she’s legit. I bought my kefir grains from her many years ago and am still using them. When they proliferate too much, I give some to a friend. (However, you can also just blend the extra into your smoothie if your kefir grains become the Thing That Ate Chicago.)

*Tip about dollar weed: Here’s my FB post when I first discovered this weed is not just edible, and I’m showing you a photo of it; once you’ve seen it, you won’t forget it. I’d never seen it in Utah, but it is absolutely everywhere in Florida. It’s considered a longevity superfood in Asia, which made my day. Easier to blend than juice, unless you have a Norwalk pressing juicer (time consuming, though expensive and ideal). Someone on the internet shows a chilled glass of dollar weed juice, also called penny wort. Don’t pick this wild edible near a roadway where it’s absorbing exhaust, or in a lawn or area sprayed with herbicide or any of the -cides.

*Tip about freezing bananas: freeze chunks of bananas, before they go bad. I use very little fruit in my green smoothies, but bananas aren’t optional, they make it creamy, which you need if you’re doing a lot of hardcore greens such as in this hardcore foraging smoothie. But don’t remove the peel! Just cut off the top and bottom (make sure the banana is organic), and cut your banana in chunks to freeze, and add to the blender later. You won’t even notice any taste or texture in your smoothie, I promise. And that peel is very anti-diabetic as the inulin and absorptive fiber slows down any impact on blood sugar.

*Tip about aloe vera: It is highly soothing to the gut, just like it’s famous for being soothing to the skin after a sunburn. Think of it as an internal anti-inflammatory you can get in your smoothie daily. It’s a medicinal remedy you can grow in the garden. I just transplanted some plants I got at the nursery, and you can cut off one stalk once a week, so I like to grow 2-3 plants (they regrow new stalks when you cut them back). Aloe that isn’t peeled can cause diarrhea for some, especially first-timers, so 1 stalk in a whole blender is enough, and you can also buy it from Aloe One by the gallon, with the skin removed (which is what causes diarrhea for some people, I’ve not experienced it but I use aloe a lot).

I bought two foraging books, too, because you want to be able to identify plants whether you have access to the internet or not.

If my work has made a difference in your life, please consider subscribing, for $10/mo. Our content will increasingly be preparedness help and health-strategies and natural-medicine strategies like today’s blog post. Your monthly subscription helps keep my 15 employees and me doing our good work to serve you. And, please assume that some of the links I may share, compensate my small business.